Girls Gone Wild
Britney, Bertha, and Anita Blake (How a Southern Virgin, a Fallen Angel, and an Abstinent Vampire Slayer Became Depraved Women)
HEATHER SWAIN
A good story demands transformation, and for Protestant America’s buck, not much beats virtuous Christian girls tumbling into depravation. The mother/whore, the fallen angel, the good girl gone bad rivets readers to the page. When the preacher’s daughter winds up the pregnant homecoming queen (or for that matter, the vice-presidential nominee’s knocked-up teen stands hand in hand with her hunky beau at the Republican National Convention), only the most enlightened don’t snicker behind curled fingers. Even though most modern women think of themselves as liberated and in control of their bodies and libidos, society still has a penchant for demonizing those of the fairer sex who slide down the slope from virgin to sexualized woman. The sweeter the girl and the farther her fall, the better. It’s enough to make a girl ask, Can’t I just like sex?
The fall of a good woman is a tale that’s kept the printing presses churning for centuries, yet there’s always a deeper story. If you look past all those flaky flashers on the Girls Gone Wild infomercials, you just might find a narrative about the precarious balance of power, sex, and gender politics that has followed women from the Old Testament to US Weekly and everything in between—including the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton.
At the beginning of Hamilton’s series, Anita Blake is a twenty-seven-year-old celibate Christian with a strict moral code about how to use her abilities as a necromancer. Despite her prickly attitude, Anita is a champion for the little guy, even if that guy happens to be a monster sometimes. As she reminds readers over and over again, no matter how much it may rankle her, non-humans have rights in her world. In her work animators frequently cross the line and use their abilities for ill-gotten gains, but Anita balks. She has no problem raising the dead for a profit or killing someone (or something), but only if there’s a good reason. And for Anita, that reason is often that if she doesn’t, someone innocent will get hurt.
We know that Anita was engaged a few years back but got burned when her fiancé’s mother turned out to be a closet racist who didn’t want a half-Mexican daughter-in-law. The relationship ended badly and Anita swore off sex before marriage. While her Christian beliefs inform much of her moral code, Biblical doctrine isn’t the underpinning for Anita’s stance on premarital sex. Her Christianity has more to do with demarcating herself from the monsters that she kills. Anita believes in an afterlife that holds more promise than earthly immortality and the only way to get to the afterlife is through death. But—as anyone who’s read beyond book ten, Narcissus in Chains, knows—eventually all of that changes and Anita Blake ends up as far from celibate or married (or Heaven, for that matter) as Britney Spears is.
There are cultural doomsayers who like to believe women such as Anita and the popularity of the stories about them are a problem of the modern age, but that’s nostalgia for you. Some of the stodgiest classics that high schoolers slog through today were the most scandalous literature of their era. Critics dismissed Jane Austen as fluff, accused the Brontës of being coarse, and Simone de Beauvoir may as well have written porn for all the flack she took.
One of the most enduring depraved women in English literature is Bertha Mason, from Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre.
By the time plain Jane shows up as the governess for Edward Rochester’s illegitimate French ward, Adele, she has learned to temper her inner raging woman. This is in stark contrast to Rochester’s wife Bertha—his brown sugar mama, who beguiled him with her seductive Creole charm then became a raving lunatic when he brought her back from Jamaica to the civilized world of merry old England where women were expected to submissively devote themselves to their husband’s every need. Now (unbeknownst to Jane) Bertha spends her days locked in an attic, guarded by a drunken maid, Grace Poole, who is equally pissed at the world but chooses to drown her sorrows in a pint of ale rather than go mad.
One could read Jane Eyre as a warning to women who refuse to acquiesce to their husband’s power. Rochester claims Bertha is “intemperate and unchaste,” a “lunatic” both “cunning and malignant.” He further explains away Bertha’s condition as hereditary. Seems her mother and grandmother lost their marbles back in Jamaica. But I’m not buying it. Once Jane and Rochester reveal their love for one another, Bertha acts far too lucidly for a lunatic, no matter how cunning. After Rochester proposes to Jane, Bertha escapes the attic and enters Jane’s bedroom, where she places Jane’s wedding veil on her own head, then flings it to the ground and tramples it. Whether this is Bertha’s way of warning Jane to stay away from Edward because he’s bad news for women or a warning for Jane to steer clear of Bertha’s man (she is still Edward’s wife, after all) is anybody’s guess. Either way, Bertha’s behavior hardly seems maniacal. Rochester brushes off the incident by blaming poor, drunken Grace Poole.
(It’s amusing to imagine at this point that literary worlds could collide. What if Anita were plopped down into Jane Eyre as Jane herself? First off, Bertha probably would’ve had her ass whooped for trampling the veil, and secondly, I doubt Anita/Jane would have taken Rochester’s crap. She’d have had him in some judo hold until he admitted the truth. But this is not the case. If anything, Anita has much more in common with Bertha.)
Bertha’s brother is the one who stops Jane and Rochester’s wedding, by revealing the existence of Bertha. Seems polygamy was frowned upon in England then as now. However, even after the wedding is called off, Rochester tries to persuade Jane to become his mistress (thus tempting her through the door of depravity). To woo Jane, Rochester says she is just what he’s been searching for—the “antipodes of Creole.” Nice guy—sexist and racist, to boot.
An alternate reading posits that Brontë used Bertha Mason to illustrate what happens when women repress their rage for too long. Bertha’s not the only angry woman in the novel, but she’s the one who lost it all by becoming volatile. Bertha’s volatility flew in the face of the prevailing Victorian notion of the good wife popularized by Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem “Angel in the House,” which extolled the virtues of a wife who was meek, self-sacrificing, and pure. Bertha was none of those things, plus she was mad as hell. As the feminist scholar Jane Anderson points out, “to be an angry woman in nineteenth-century England is next-door to insanity.”
1 Rochester believes Bertha is crazy, but he also links her condition to her lack of chastity. Seems there’s no room in Victorian England for a woman who gets mad and likes to fuck. Anita wouldn’t have stood a chance back then. They’d have locked her up and called her crazy.
Like most female novelists of her day, Brontë wrote under a pen name, Currer Bell, to disguise her gender. Reviews of Jane Eyre were quite favorable when critics believed a man had written it. But when Currer was revealed to be Charlotte, the criticism turned ugly. A reviewer for the Rambler skewered Brontë for her “relapse into that class of ideas, expressions, and circumstances, which is most connected with the grosser and more animal portion of our nature.” In other words, she had the audacity and poor taste to allude to sex. Not only could women not like to do it without mental illness to blame, they couldn’t even write about women who might.
Since Anita Blake is an incarnation of the late twentieth-century, Hamilton probably didn’t think she’d have to worry about such priggish reviewers. And at first, sex wasn’t an issue because Anita remains celibate for six books. Not even the super hot Master of the City, vampire Jean-Claude, causes Anita to swoon—which is saying something because Jean-Claude oozes sex. This is not unlike Jane refusing to become Rochester’s mistress. Both Jane and Anita base their refusals on morality. For Jane, her Christian beliefs dictate that sex outside of marriage is a sin. For Anita, her desire to attain a Christian afterlife stops her from bedding a vampire. Anita, unlike Jane, might not believe she’d go to Hell for premarital sex, but she does worry that once she crosses the line from human to monster, she might lose her ability to die and therefore lose her place in Heaven.
Rochester is Brontë’s Byronic Man—the kind of guy Lord Byron’s ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” And Jane is madly in love with him, but she won’t compromise her hard-earned virtue. Anita feels similarly about Jean-Claude, although instead of love she feels pure lust. Maybe Jane and Anita could have a support group for Women Who Run with Wolves . . . and Vampires . . . and Werewolves, too.
Later, when Anita falls in love with hunky, thoughtful Richard (who just happens to be a werewolf), she keeps her pants on. It’s one thing for her to turn down a vampire. She knows that getting involved with Jean-Claude necessarily means she’ll wind up his human servant and then it’s bye-bye afterlife. But for Anita to turn down the man she loves unless they’re married is some seriously Victorian thinking. Richard doesn’t mind, though; he simply asks Anita to marry him. And Anita says yes. At first. Until she says no, that is, and eventually gets involved with both Jean-Claude and Richard. Ah, the tumble begins!
Creating stories about women’s chastity and the lack thereof isn’t only the providence of novelists. A whole genre of fiction is devoted to rewriting the sexual history of female celebrities. Real life offers plenty of good girls gone bad to captivate mass audiences. How else would the paparazzi stay in business? Every era has its Jezebels; the twenty-first century simply has more media outlets to cover degradation. And Britney Spears has been covered in every one of them.
As Vanessa Grigoriadis points out in her 2008 Rolling Stone article “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” Britney was “created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement.” Once Britney left Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, she signed on with manager Larry Rudolph, who promoted seventeen-year-old Britney as a Southern good girl with just a hint of Lolita thrown in to titillate. This version of Britney’s life claimed that she was a virgin and planned on saving herself for marriage, even as she dated teen heartthrob Justin Timberlake. Spears’ mother, Lynn, debunked that myth years later in her tell-all book, Through the Storm, in which she claimed Britney lost her virginity at fourteen to her high school boyfriend and that she routinely slept with Timberlake. This from her own mother!
Britney has more in common with Bertha Mason and Anita Blake than you might think. Some speculate the reasons for Britney’s unchaste behavior (both in and out of the sack) could be hereditary. Her grandmother was thought to have been mentally ill, as evidenced by shooting herself on the grave of her dead son, pulling the trigger of a shotgun with her big toe. Anita has her own issues of maternal heredity, probably gaining her innate powers of necromancy from her mother’s mother, who was a voodoo queen. But there could also be an alternate reading to the Britney Spears story. Like Bertha, Britney is raging against a world that tried to pin her into a tightly circumscribed role. As Grigoriadis says, Britney “doesn’t want anything to do with the person the world thought she was.” Her current image as a paparazzi-baiting, drug-abusing, head-shaving, midriff-baring sex kitten is about as far from a good Southern girl as Britney could get. And like Bertha, in the process of losing her mind Britney lost nearly everything else in her life—her marriage to Kevin Federline failed, she lost custody of her children, and she’s gone in and out of rehab.
Anita is no stranger to rage either, but in her case wrath is a job skill. Anita is able to channel her anger into something productive—killing monsters. Plus, she’s the only one of these three women who’s licensed to carry a gun. Being a pissy woman who’s allowed to shoot bad guys—without punishment—is one of the reasons Anita is so fun to read. Bertha eventually exacts her revenge on Rochester by setting fire to his estate, but while Rochester loses his sight and one hand while fighting the fire, Bertha dies engulfed in the hell-like blaze. Britney’s rage is the most impotent of the three because it hurts nobody but herself (and possibly her children, who’ve, at least for now, lost their mother).
Also like Britney, Anita was set up for her big fall. By making Anita Christian to distinguish her from the monsters, Hamilton allows her to plummet from grace when she finally becomes Jean-Claude’s lover. Britney’s damnation may not be eternal (there’s always next year’s VMA Awards) but by accepting Jean-Claude’s marks, Anita gives up the one thing she held dear: her chance at a Christian afterlife. But unlike Britney and Bertha, Anita has an out and that out is power.
Where neither Bertha nor Britney could find a toe hold in the world that shaped them and their rage, Anita takes control. She enters a triumvirate with Richard and Jean-Claude in which the vampire, animal servant, and human servant are linked and share power. In turn, Anita becomes Jean-Claude’s human servant (thus accepting potential immortality) so the messy doctrine of eternal life via Christianity is out of the way. This doesn’t mean that Anita no longer considers herself a Christian, just that she doesn’t consider all the sex she’s having to be immoral because she’s no longer concerned about mortality and an afterlife in a Christian Heaven. In other words, Anita has chosen to play by new rules.
As a consequence of joining forces with Jean-Claude, Anita is infected with the ardeur. If mental illness is what drove Bertha and Britney over the edge, the ardeur is what makes Anita change from celibate to swinger, and unlike insanity (in Bertha and Britney’s cases), this gives her more power, not less. In order to keep the ardeur in check, Anita must have several lovers or the ardeur will drain her, possibly killing her. She leaves Richard and shacks up with two wereleopards, plus takes on many other lovers to feed her need—sex every six hours. At this point, Anita has to fuck to live.
Here’s where Anita’s story trumps Bertha and Britney’s. When Hamilton gives Anita a reason to go hog wild with sex, she allows the line between human and monster to blur. Anita gains empathy for the creatures she hunts because she’s able to see her own will to survive a difficult and unjust world reflected in their lives. Anita says herself, “One of my favorite things about hanging out with the monsters is the healing. Straight humans seemed to get killed on me a lot. Monsters survived. Let’s hear it for the monsters” (Cerulean Sins). Not only does Anita accept that monsters may have something over humans, but physically she now harbors strains of lycanthrope which may eventually lead to her becoming a shapeshifter. Not only does Anita change from a celibate woman to a highly sexualized being, but her very nature shifts. The fall is complete, but unlike her literary and real-life predecessors, Anita’s tumble doesn’t undo her. It only makes her stronger.
Gender politics, sex, and power have long been linked in literature and in life, but few characters have had as much fun with them as Anita Blake. In the end, Anita didn’t need a man to rescue her from depravity. Hamilton said herself that she set out to write a strong female protagonist who got to do the things men usually get to do in hard-boiled detective novels: kill people without remorse and have lots of sex. Without someone giving them the same permission to live life like a man, Bertha and Britney both crashed and burned, but Anita embraces her depravity as a form of power and has a hell of a good time on her way down.
When Hamilton started the Anita Blake series, she felt there remained a prevailing notion in society that women should not be comfortable, let alone bold, about their sexuality and desire. But over the course of sixteen novels, Hamilton questioned that presumption and slowly shifted Anita into a woman who was both comfortable and bold.
This move has won Anita Blake millions of fans (as evidenced by the number of weeks she’s lounged around the New York Times best-seller list over the past fifteen years). Britney has retained her wild popularity in spite of, or perhaps because of, her ups and downs, but her “fans” seem to find pity in and fascination for her plight. They laud her accomplishments, but also stand in line to watch her stumble. Bertha’s most enduring readers tend to be feminist scholars who look for historical clues about the changing nature of womanhood via literature. Anita fans are different.
Hamilton has taken a fair amount of flack (from critics and fans) for turning Anita books into soft-core monster porn, yet she retains a huge devout group of fans who don’t simply read about Anita’s exploits, they look to her for life lessons. She’s a rare female character who’s dangerous and can also take care of herself. She rarely relies on a man to save her tail, but if it turns out that way, she returns the favor in kind later. Although we don’t live in world of vampires and werebeasts, real women face their own demons, and according to Hamilton some female fans have left abusive relationships because they said they knew Anita wouldn’t take treatment like that.
So this begs the question: is Anita another fallen woman whose popularity hinges on our collective love for watching women tumble? Not in my book. Hamilton wrote new rules for the female protagonist. She could be tough, she could be sexy, she could even be bitchy. She could do whatever she needed to protect herself and make herself happy. I think Anita continues to appeal because, far from falling, she soars.
Heather Swain is the author of the young adult novels
Me, My Elf and I and
Selfish Elf Wish as well as two novels for adults (
Eliot’s Banana and
Luscious Lemon), personal essays, magazine articles, and short stories. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two young children, but you can stop by her website
www.heatherswainbooks.comanytime for a visit.
First, I hate ambiguity. It’s one of my least favorite things. Most of the time, I would rather have a firm no than a maybe. A no means I can move on, a maybe traps me in that gray area between yes and no. That being one of my personality traits, it was inevitable that the dance of will Anita sleep with, or kill, Jean-Claude? was going to be answered. I actually set it up to kill him at the end of book three, Circus of the Damned, but when the moment came Anita would have missed him, and so would I. The kiss-me-kill-me paradigm can only interest me so long and then I want a choice. People seem to think that Anita not choosing one of the men is ambiguity, but it’s not. The choice Anita made was not to pick a single man to be monogamous with, and I’m still taking heat for that particular choice. It certainly wasn’t the original plan, but if your first plan doesn’t work, make a new one, and keep doing that until something works.
Second, one of the reasons that Anita Blake came on the scene guns blazing and gender roles be damned was that I didn’t know how to be a girl. My grandmother raised me to be the boy. It was more important how much I could lift and how hard I could work than what I looked like. What I could do mattered more than how I appeared. I was never, ever told that I should be a soft, feminine, nurturing, passive recipient of any male action. I was raised on stories of my grandfather abusing my grandmother for the twenty years of their marriage. My own biological father had left my mother and they were divorced by the time I was six months old. Men were no good, according to my grandmother, and I didn’t need one. I found as I got older it was more fair to say that not all people are good, regardless of their gender, and that though I didn’t need a man in a traditional role in my life I did want a man in my life if he could be a true life partner. I always wanted a partner, an equal. Even though my first husband and I divorced he never treated me as less-than because I was a woman, except for a memorable lapse when some male friends convinced him he needed to be the head of the household. I soon let him know that if I couldn’t be equal, I wanted nothing to do with him. He backpedaled and never brought it up again. Some things you do not compromise on and being an equal in my marriage was one of them.
Growing up I saw a lot of things. I saw that soft women were victims. I saw that seemingly strong women fell in love and lost their gumption and folded into some feminine ideal that made them victims. Nurturing is good, but I demanded my first husband help with our daughter, and when he had another lapse during my pregnancy with her I told him this: “If you force me to raise our baby like I’m a single parent, I will be.” I meant it, he knew it, and he has been a devoted father ever since.
I did not even know that there was an entire girl culture I was clueless about until just a year or so ago, when other women were trying to convince me that I should feel intimidated by a new friend who happened to be tall, blond, blue-eyed, voluptuous, and gorgeous. I didn’t understand why I was supposed to be intimidated by my friend. One female business associate explained, patiently, that I should be jealous, or competitive, with my friend. I asked, “Why? She’s my friend. The rain is wet and she’s beautiful. Why should that bother me?” She never could explain it to me, but later that business trip she showed me: by sandbagging me before an important business dinner. I did the guy thing, and asked her if I needed to dress up for the event. She assured me that business clothes were fine.
When I arrived at the event, I was the only woman there not dressed to kill. Cocktail dresses or more, full make-up, professionally styled hair—the works. The woman herself was in a semi-formal sequined number with her hair done up on top of her head in elaborate curls. In that moment, I got it. I’d intimidated her because I was attractive by her standards and she’d feared that if I dressed up I’d look better than she did. I got that she’d lied to me so I wouldn’t look as dressed up. I was the most casually dressed woman there. Did it bother me? Yes, because I hate being lied to. Did it make me feel less of a woman by wearing something that wasn’t as frilly? No. I wasn’t competing with anyone at the business function. I was there for business, not to see who could be queen bitch. But this one incident explained a lifetime of mystery regarding other women, and before that other girls, to me. I had been on the receiving end of things like this my whole life and never understood that most of the other women were playing by this secret game, one that I had never been told existed.
I’m only competitive with myself and with people I see as true competition in business. But not in the cutthroat way, only, How is that writer doing better than me? What are they doing that I’m not? Who’s making more money? Find out how. More prestige? Find out how. I’ve always looked around and found the writers doing better than me in some way and tried to find out their business plan and do my own version of it. I play to win the big picture, not the small squabbles, but I also play like I believe a woman is “supposed” to play if she really were the kinder sex. I like to see everyone succeed. I’m helpful if I can be. I have never knowingly undercut another woman personally, or in business, just because she was a woman and I felt she might look better than me in a dress. That kind of thinking hurts not only the woman who’s being picked on, but even more the woman doing it. The female business associate who was so intimidated by me lost a chance to be my friend, and I try to be a really good friend.
I’m still very good friends with my tall, gorgeous, blond, blue-eyed friend. She and I get along just fine.
—Laurell
